Grounding Psychotherapy in Self-Compassion is the title of a book just published by Guilford Press in March of 2025. It is an edited work with chapters on key aspects of how compassion can facilitate the practice of psychotherapy and increase our wellbeing in ways few other things can.
My own contribution to the book is found in chapter 12: Alcoholism, Addictions, and Self Compassion.
The book is primarily intended for therapists and other mental health practitioners and is another big step for psychotherapy. And, it is also for those receiving psychotherapy to better understand their individual experience in a larger context; it can be very helpful to almost anyone in this regard.
Here I describe the general background on which the book is premised.
The inner critical, shaming, voice
One of the most frequent complaints we hear from clients in psychotherapy is that of an inner negative, critical voice, which is often the first to react and to keep them up at night. This critical inner voice almost always carries with it a sense of helplessness, of doom, that one is never going to get better and that this voice will never go away.
There seem to be two beings in this dynamic: one’s own self and this other place wherever the “voice” is coming from. Psychologists call this state of affair “self-alienation”. Self-alienation is synonymous with shame.
What is shame?
Shame has served an evolutionary function to safeguard the ethics and customs of the tribe. When someone goes over the line in a community, they are shamed in one way or another: banned from the community, paraded through the square in a cage, or some other method of making it clear that this person does not belong here anymore.
Even today, shame is one of the most painful experiences we humans can have –– being banned from the group. In modern times, this has easily morphed into a general desire to belong, hence, the majority of the drive for social media is to belong. And people feel like they don’t belong or whose view of themselves is very negative, they strive to be liked by basing their own character on the opinions and behaviors of others.
Fortunately, from clinical and research experience, it was discovered that there are antidotes to shame – compassion. This work on the importance of compassion and self-compassion in psychotherapy was pioneered by psychologist, Paul Gilbert, pioneered research studies.
Compassion has three modes:
- giving compassion to others,
- receiving compassion from others and
- giving compassion to oneself.
It is in the latter that it seems we are most lacking. Fortunately, all of the forms of compassion can be cultivated with practice.
The antidote to self-shaming is self-compassion
As some of you may know, there has been a paradigm shift in psychotherapy starting in the late 60s and early 70. Therapists began to see their patients from a different perspective other than being “deficient”. They began to see their clients as fundamentally good and whole, rather than defective or having a chemical imbalance. And, from this standpoint, the role of the therapist became one of facilitating the patient to access and utilize their own inner resources. And it saw the diagnoses of anxiety, depression, etc., as the obstacles to those inner resources. Some of the main forces in this revolution were Carl Rogers, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Donald Winnicott, Salvatore Minuchin, the Esalen Institute, to name just a few.
Research based on the early theories have confirmed and extended this shift with the help of compassion and self-compassion. As a component of psychotherapy, at first, compassion seemed odd. Since compassion was taught extensively in contemplative religious traditions, when discussed outside of that context, it was considered to be a fuzzy concept.
Research on the application of compassion in psychotherapy had been going on at a trickle for some time, but Paul Gilbert began to use compassion in this psychotherapy directly and published his first paper in 1990. And he continued to organize research studies to further confirm and refine his experiences with patients.
This led him to create Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT). And a little later, Kristen Neff and Christopher Germer created the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program. And today, there are additional trainings specifically for therapists to adopt and apply the principles and exercises of that program to specific situations.
Your own practice awaits
The book Grounding Psychotherapy in Self-Compassion recounts all the recent findings and directions in the field. While it is intended to further the clinical application of compassion in psychotherapy, it can be very helpful for clients and patients to get a better understanding of what compassion is, and what it is not, and how it might facilitate their healing journey.
The contemplative traditions tell us that the practice of compassion goes on for a lifetime. And now we have a body of research showing that, when compassion and self-compassion are practiced regularly, there can be an increase in general wellbeing; one is less reactive and more responsive; the ups and downs of life aren’t so extreme; and we begin to nurture ourselves in ways we were not in the past.
It is my hope that, if compassion is relatively new to you as support in the therapeutic process or in your life in general, you will investigate further. It’s been my personal experience that the more I learn about compassion, the deeper and broader the understandings become as its gifts unfold.
If you found this article useful and would like to further explore the concepts of mindfulness and compassion, head over to our programs page where you find additional events and programs to deepen your knowledge and practice.